Last week TechCrunch writer Kim-Mai Cutler recounted his experience using the brand-new medical marijuana home physician service CannabisMD, currently available in San Francisco, Berkley, and Oakland.
CannabisMD dispatches a licensed physician right to your front door for medical marijuana evaluations, while Meadow – CannabisMD's parent startup co-founded by David Hua, Rick Harrison, Harrison Lee, and Scott Garman – is a mobile app-based medical marijuana delivery service that functions similarly to the uber-convenient on-demand car service that everyone loves to hate (and loves to use), Uber.
Co-founder David Hua is an entrepreneur extraordinaire, graduate of Oakland's Oaksterdam University (which educates students on all aspects of the cannabis industry), and self-described "plus one" to his wife's popular food blog Lick My Spoon – he's even got her on the cannabis bandwagon promoting gourmet marijuana edibles. He describes Meadow as "GrubHub for cannabis." The startup has recently received funding from Y Combinator, which has funded over 800 startups since 2005 including Scribd, Reddit, Airbnb, Dropbox, Disqus, and Stripe.
CannabisMD acts as a booking agent connecting licensed physicians to patients. Right now the appointments are scheduled, but will later be offered on-demand. A consultation takes 15-45 minutes and costs $100 for new patients, $50 for renewals. During the consultation the physician will ask the patient why he or she would like to use medical marijuana and will then determine if he or she is a candidate for a medical marijuana card.
With Meadow, patients can peruse dispensaries' menus and the dispensaries themselves handle the delivery, which Meadow then gets a percentage of. The company takes great pains to ensure compliance with local marijuana regulations and doesn't actually sell marijuana – it sells software – with plans of full integration with dispensaries' inventories in the future.
As the social stigma around marijuana decreases in tandem with a rapid shift in regulatory legislation across the country, a "green rush" is starting to happen – one in which progressive investors with a keen eye on this burgeoning cash crop stand to make obscene amounts of money. To recap, the State of Colorado is making more money in marijuana-related tax revenue than they know what to do with, Colorado and Washington are expecting $800 million in tax revenue this year), and the medical marijuana industry pulled in $2.7 billion in 2014, up from $1.5 billion the previous year. It seems only natural then that venture capitalists are all too eager to invest in the budding marijuana industry. (Pun intended.)